December 25, 2004

The owners of e-bay.nl have been ordered to pay a fine of 7000 € for registering this domain name [The Register]. Remarkably, under the Regulations for arbitration on .nl domains, there can be "an order for the Domain Name Holder to pay the costs of the arbitration procedure, including the cost of legal assistance provided for in Article 28.8." (article 3.1).

Now that Google has another wonderful tool, Google Suggest, a geek named Hatta tried it with just one letter. Here is the interesting results list (spotted on Inside Google):
A is for Amazon
B is for Best Buy
C is for CNN
D is for Dictionary
E is for Ebay
F is for Firefox
G is for Games
H is for Hotmail
I is for Ikea
J is for Jokes
K is for Kazaa
L is for Lyrics
M is for Mapquest
N is for News
O is for Online dictionary
P is for Paris Hilton
Q is for Quotes
R is for Recipes
S is for Spybot
T is for Tara Reid
U is for Ups
V is for Verizon
W is for Weather
X is for Xbox
Y is for Yahoo
Z is for Zip Codes

Spotted on The Blogbook: Now, Google Groups hides all email addresses, "including historical postings Google took over, addresses placed inside message bodies, etc." This is an interesting feature. But what do the owners of the e-mail address think? (If they are owners, of course, because it happens that many addresses belong to professional providers).

December 08, 2004

This interesting quotation, in a NAF decision: "Respondent is appropriating Complainant's GOLDEN DOOR mark to advertise its services and exhibit naked women; a practice Complainant calls "pornosquatting." While the Panel is not familiar with this term, it finds that appropriating Complainant"s mark to exhibit pornography is evidence of bad faith registration and use pursuant to Policy § 4(a)(iii)".
Complainant previously defined so-called porno-squatting as "the practice in which a cyber squatter tries to take advantage of a well-known trademark and/or trade name to attract Internet users to a pornographic website."
[goldendoor2.com, Wyndham IP Corporation v. Golden Door, NAF 341231].

Domain Mart says that there is a new (but is it really new?) type of domain-name hijacking being carried out unnoticed. It involves third-level domain-names associated with affiliate programs.
For example, if you had been an online affiliate of, say, company xyz.com, your affiliate internet address could have looked like YourCompanyName.xyz.com. If you or xyz.com terminates the relationship, xyz.com might decide to assign your affiliate address YourCompanyName.xyz.com to a new entity that has no relationship to you or YourCompanyName. The new entity would use YourCompanyName to exploit its intrinsic value.

December 07, 2004

Rare enough (so far...) to mention: Before the Prague High Court, a company has won a battle over ceskapojistovna.cz. According to Jiří Dohnal, CEO of the Czech NIC, the ČP case is the fifth lawsuit that has been decided there.
[Czech Business]

A Florida biopharmaceutical company allegedly embedded trademarked names of five other biopharmaceutical companies in the coding of its Web site, a South Carolina company alleges in a suit filed in Miami.
Blood Diagnostics Inc., one of the five companies, claims that Health Coalition Inc. used Blood Diagnostics' trademarked name BDI Blood Diagnostics as a metatag on its website, healthcoalition.com, in a calculated effort to harm the company's business.
[Law.com]

According to The Register, the German Supreme Court "has ruled that merely registering generic terms as domain names does not constitute an unethical intent to cause damage... The court says that registering domain names is typically based on a first-come, first-served principle. The resulting advantage for the person who registers first can thus not be seen as unethical, the Court argues."
A publishing group sued a man who registered 4,000 domain names, among which weltonline.de, that the complainant deemed similar to the trademark Die Welt it uses for a newspaper. The court did not follow the complainant's arguments.

December 06, 2004

Online retailers seem to be doing fine overall this holiday season, but search marketers appear to be spending less on their ads. The average key word price dropped 3.6% amid lower demand over the Thanksgiving weekend, according to MediaDailyNews 12-06-04.

BoingBoing reports that Microsoft's new blog platform, MSN Spaces, is rejecting certain blog titles or URLs because they contain words that the company has deemed inappropriate. For a list of forbidden words, see here. MSN Spaces doesn't want its users to open a blog with a dirty word or any sex-related name, or even with the title "Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov"!
In one of its posts on the question, Boing Boing reports that the Chinese policy seems even stricter, preventing the users from using names such as cao which has a sexual connotation but also plenty other meanings.
As G. Waerden puts it: "Getting a blog with a dirty name past the MSN Spaces controls may be fun, but it also illustrates the tensions between the traditionally free and open world of blogging and the more corporate approach of a software giant like Microsoft."

For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a "Submission"), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission.

On November 29 2004, Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court heard the case brought by Beijing ChinaInternet Information Co., Ltd. (CI), seeking validation of its exclusive right to the two domain names, fox.com.cn and fox.cn.
In October 1997, CI registered the domain name fox.com.cn. It also registered fox.cn in March 2003. However, in May this year, US 20th Century Fox appealed to the China International Domain Name Dispute Settlement Center, requesting that CI transfer the two domain names to them. One month later, the Domain Name Dispute Settlement Center made their decision in favor of Fox.
More on Rouse China IP Express 236.

December 03, 2004

Answering a question on proceedings regarding third level domain names asked on the INTA discussion list, John Berryhill points out this:

An outfit named Centralnic has a lot of two-letter country codes in .com, and sells registrations of the form < name >.< cc >.com, where "cc" is a country name. They include the UDRP into their third level registration contract.

On this question of third level domains dispute, Frédéric Glaize and I wrote an article on the first - and so far unique - French case in which the owner of the trademark "Jeunes a Paris" sued the user of jeunes.paris.fr" (and won). The article is in French, but there are references to resources written in English (especially footnotes 15, 16, 17).

A decision about a singular name, nnn.com. The complainant failed to prove that the respondent's main business was to try to sell this name.Eventually, the panel wrote: "... because the Respondent did not know that NNN corresponded to the specific trademark of the Complainant and was essentially "just shooting in the dark," the Panel finds that the Complainant has not proven the third part of the test of the Policy."

The number of domain names worldwide grew 5.1 million to 66.3 million, the biggest quarterly increase ever, VeriSign reported. The pay-per-click advertising industry is largely responsible for the growth of domain names this year, VeriSign said.

On Sunday, Nov. 28, Julia Roberts had twins, Hazel and Phinnaeus (one can not like these names).. She also gave birth to a landmark UDRP case, when she obtained the transfer of juliaroberts.com.
hazel.com was already registered before Hazel Roberts was born. But phinnaeus.com has been registered on... Nov. 28 this year. It was a coincidence, your Honor!

Further, when selling potentially offensive yet true historical pieces, sellers must ensure that the language in their listings shows appropriate sensitivity to those in the community that might view it. For example, sellers may not use offensive words and phrases such as "Jap" or "Nigger" in the title or description of their listing, even if that word is part of the proper name or trademark of the item. Sellers may, however, display an image of such historical items within their listing even if the offensive word is plainly visible within the historical item...Artists occasionally use offensive words and phrases such as "Nigger" and "Jap" in the titles of media items such as books, movies, music and artwork. Examples of such items include books from prominent authors such as Randall Kennedy, Joseph Conrad and H. Rap Brown, and musicians such as John Lennon. Sellers may use such words and phrases in the title and description of their listings within media categories such as Books, Movies and Music, provided that the offensive words are actually part of the title of the listed item. eBay urges all of its community members to treat others as they themselves would like to be treated.